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The spirit of '76. 



HOW IT IS ILLUSTRATED IN THE HEROIC STRUGGLE 
OF THE CUBAN PATRIOTS. 



SPEECH 



OP 



HON. AMOS J. CUMMINGS, 

OB* NE:^?V YORK, 

--■ "" IN THE 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. 



SATURDAY, JANUARY 22, 1898. 



•WASHINGTON. 

1898, 






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THE SPIRIT OF '76. 



Mr. CUMMINGS said: 

Mr. Chairman: If there is anything precious, endearing, and 
potential in the American people, it is the spirit of 76. Sir, it is 
the germ of our existence as a nation. It ought to be as enduring 
as endearing. Is it? The spirit of 76! What was it? What is it? 
It was here one hundred and twenty years ago. Is it here to-day? 
We have often heard of it. Its great work is before us. But do 
we comprehend it? It expressed itself in so many events during 
tiie dramatic period of the Revolution that a definite idea of it can 
not be gained from any one of them. It was in truth an evolution 
in government. It was in sooth a parting of ways. 

"When the devil of tyranny once enters the body politic," said 
Macaulay, "it departs not but by struggles, by groanings, and by 
great convulsions. " The world was ripe. The hour for the great 
struggle had arrived and the agony was on. The battle was 
between legitimacy and individual and public rights. It was a 
shifting of the power of the state from the will of the monarch to 
the control of the people. 

"I will govern according to the public weal, but not according 
to the public will," bluntly declared James I. George III set 
himself to the pace. This states the issue precisely. It was the 
public will against the will of the monarch. The promulgation 
of the issue astonished the world. The result enlightened it more 
than it had ever been enlightened in regard to government. It 
awakened intellectual activity as to the rights of man and the 
philosophy of government. All that is ferocious and grasping in 
tyranny came to the front. All that is grand in sacrifice met it, 
humiliated it, conquered it. 

Sir, the victorious impulse was called the spirit of 76; but it was 

not born in 76. It has a biography in the history of our race run- 
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ning back through ages. Over and over again it tried to assert 
itself and was as often stricken down by the mailed hand of des- 
potism. On every page of the history of the race, either by its 
own efforts or by measures for its suppression, it records itself. 
If, instead of pitchforks and staves, Jack Cade and his followers 
had possessed the ballot, as we now possess it, they would have 
overthrown monarchy in a day. Their provocation was as great 
and their motives as just as those that inspired the heroes of our 
Revolution. They were utterly overwhelmed. A servile litera- 
ture gave them an inheritance of infamy; but a just judgment is 
lifting it into a reminiscent glory. Many and many another effort 
has gone down before the atrocious spirit of grasping tyrainny. 

In these struggles for freedom we trace the growth of the spirit 
of 76. Though its growth was slow, it was constant as to its pur- 
pose and undeviating. In our Revolution it had a new advantage. 
An ocean roiled between it and its pursuers. For the first time 
in history it had a broad field upon which to demonstrate. It 
turned at bay, erect, grand, defiant. It spoke to General Gage 
through the lips of the schoolboys on Boston Common; it in- 
spired the negro Attucks in the Boston massacre; it was manifest 
in the tea chests afloat in Boston Harbor; it appeared in the belfry 
of the Old North Church, and sent Paul Revere on his famous 
ride; it spoke spitefully from the muzzles of American rifles at 
Concord and Lexington, and it sanctified itself in the blood of 
Warren at Bunker Hill. At times it appeared in qualities in no 
way akin to it. 

The Continental Army, ragged and destitute, simply did its 
bidding. That Army showed no such devotion to the person of 
its chief as did the army of Italy to Napoleon, or the Army of the 
Potomac to McClellan. Its blood-stained snow tracks at Valley 
Forge attested its devotion to the cause of liberty. At times it 
was mutinous; at times marauding. Desertions were common in 
it— even to the enemy. But the spirit of 76 always regathered 
and strengthened it. It visited every gathering, it mounted every 
pulpit, it appeared at every hearthstone, it sat at every table. 
Defying danger and death, it energized all ages and both sexes. 
It animated Moll Pitcher at Monmouth and immortalized Nathan 
Hale on the gallows. 

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As the peril darkened, it made its way across the Atlantic, en- 
tered the English Parliament, and pleaded the cause of freedom in 
the very presence of the King. Its astounding demonstration 
awoke the world, and won the applause of even savage tribes. It 
forced its way upon the great stage of human action, never again 
to relinquish a leading part. Apparently dormant after the sur- 
render at Yorktown and the signing of the treaty at Paris, it was 
roused anew by British aggression nearly thirty years afterwards, 
It arose incarnate in 1812. It tore from its adversary the crown 
of supremacy on the ocean, and awoke anew the echoes of free- 
dom on Lake Champlain and Lake Erie. [Applause.] It ideal- 
ized itself in Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, and lifted Decatur. 
Hull, Porter, McDonough, and Stewart to a level with Paul Jones 
in the temple of fame. 

• To day every monarch recognizes its presence and pays heed to 
its inspiring mandates. It is fast driving imperialism from the 
boards and filling the stage with its wholesome and godlike pres- 
ence. The divinity of its mission challenges despotism to its most 
frantic efforts. In Greece, for the moment, it seems to have lost 
its footing; but in our neighboring island, the Queen of the An- 
tilles, it is engaged in as hard a task as that which it accomplished 
on this ground. [Applause.] 

To that devoted island despotism has summoned all its terrors 
and made use of all its savage implements. But the spirit of 76 is 
there [applause] , and there to stay. All undeviating and undaunted, 
its torn and bleeding squadrons pour from mountain fastnesses on 
plain and in valley to confront and defy the uttermost efforts of 
Spanish tyranny. For some inscrutable reason it calls in vain for 
}ielp_lielp almost tendered, but still withheld. It breasts the ter- 
rible storm friendless and unaided. Marti, like another Warren, 
fell at the beginning of the conflict; Maceo, like Montgomery, 
brilliant and daring, lies dead in the second year of the war. 

But Gomez and Garcia, like another Washington and another 
Greene, maintain the deadly struggle undaunted and undismayed, 
deaf to all threats and cajolements. No Lafayette has appeared— 
not even a Louis XVI. And America only 60 miles away! A 
whole continent wrested from Spain, and Cuba left to all the hor- 
rors of extermination, without one word of official sympathy. 

2939 



Grant had only to frown on the empire set up by Louis Napoleon 
in Mexico, and it faded away. In his memoirs he says: 

I sent Sheridan with a corps to the Rio Grande to have him where he 
might aid Juarez in driving the French from. Mexico. 

He waited for no declaration of war; nor did Bazaine wait for 
it. He packed up, bag and baggage, and left American soil at 
once. But Grant is dead, Sheridan is dead. Can it be that the 
spirit of '76 has taken its departure with them? [Applause.] A 
great people were behind them, and the tyrant tottered to his fall. 
Such was the power of the great Republic at the end of our civil 
war. Has it lost its manhood within thirty years, and is there no 
majestic figure left in the affairs of the nation? [Applause.] 

Still the agonizing struggle continues at our very dOor. At 
reveille every morning the priest has been seen, crucifix in hand, 
walking beside fair youths and hoary-headed men, to be shot to 
death for no crime but their devotion to the spirit of '76. In 
every instance before the fatal volley the last exclamation of the 
victim was, "Liberty to Cuba!" The cruelty of the act wrings 
the heart, but the grandeur of the sacrifice ennobles the cause. 

The mission of America, as declared in the Monroe doctrine, is 
to foster liberty and drive despotism from this continent. [Ap- 
plause.] That doctrine is the guardian of the spirit of '76. It was 
not the expression of the sentiment of Monroe alone. It was the 
embodiment of the sentiment of the nation. Without this it 
could have no force; with it, it has proved invincible. Jackson 
was unswerving to its dictates when he scornfully refused the 
mission to Mexico with Iturbide on the throne. ' ' I will never 
recognize Iturbide as emperor," he replied. And Richard Olney 
exhibited the same American spirit when he warned England 
against her encroachments on the soil of Venezuela, freed from 
centuries of Spanish tyranny by Simon Bolivar. 

Those who revere oppression point to the struggling Cuban pa- 
triots and say that such scattered, destitute, and emaciated bands 
do not deserve freedom and would not know how to use it if they 
had it. Ah, Mr. Chairman, this is only a repetition of the scorn, 
contempt, and derision that were heaped upon Washington and 
his tattered battalions by royalists and American Tories. 

There is no appeal that will nerve the arm of a patriot like a cry 
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from the helpless. That cry comes with, appalling force from 
Cuba to-day. 

The shrieks of daughters and wives, struggling in the arms of 
the beastly Hessians in the Revolution, were incentives to action 
far more stirring than the call of the bugle and the rattle of the 
drum. The massacre at Wyoming stirred the patriots to far 
greater exertions than the capture of Ticonderoga and Crown 
Point. The licentious insolence and merciless rapacity of the 
British grenadiers lost more than their bravery gained and in- 
spired the people with a deadly enmity against the British Gov- 
ernment. 

All the outrages committed by the invaders during the period 
of the Revolution pale almost into insignificance in comparison 
with the excesses and barbarities visited upon the Cubans to-day. 
The shooting of Mrs. Caldwell, the murder of Jane McCrea, and 
the hanging of Hayne have a thousand parallels in the actions of 
the Spaniards. The horrors of British prison ships at New York 
and Charleston are exceeded by the atrocities in the Cabanas, the 
Chafarinas, and Fernando Po. The avowed purpose of Weyler 
was the extermination of the patriots. Two hundred thousand 
dead already, and a thousand a day treading in their footsteps — a 
grim reminder of the vision of Mirza. 

What must be the essentials of a spirit that can unite a people 
in a firm resolve for a great effort, and set their lives and fortunes 
upon the cast. It must have life, growth, cohesion, flexibility. 
It must have endured trials. It must be fashioned to the purpose; 
the purpose must be molded to it. It must be prudent, resolute, 
firm, unyielding; so firm and so undeviating as to fling conse- 
quences to the wind, and unflinchingly stand the hazard of the 
die. Of such material was the spirit of '76 a hundred and twenty 
years ago; of such material is the spirit of '76 to-day. 

What of the lessons of this great movement? What has it taught 
mankind? It has brought about a revolution in methods in every 
civilized country under heaven but Spain. The Spaniard alone 
refuses to learn the lesson. Is it not about time that this willful 
dullard was hurried into the class of civilization and made to 
keep pace with its progress? The spirit of '76 is a determined 
spirit. It has a firm hold on humanity, and is resolved to continue 

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its guidance ttntil the whole world is united in its scholarship. 
The period of its minority was too long and its graduation too se- 
vere for it to permit anything but progress in every branch of the 
political philosophy of which it was at once the founder and the 
guardian. 

Mr. Chairman, this Cuban question is not a question of domes- 
tic politics, but one of national policy— so high and so broad that 
it seems to me all should be agreed in regard to it. The great Re- 
public should promptly and imperatively put an end to this mon- 
strosity on our borders, abhorrent to every principle which we 
profess to uphold. [Loud applause.] 

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